


boy draws wings on everything

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Series: 2014 Trek Fics [4]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Platonic Cuddling, Sharing a Bed, Temporary Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-01 19:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8634505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: So his nurses figure out that he’s sleeping with Jim. And of course they think he’s sleeping with Jim.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ["29 Years" by The National.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cky2UDr8PYA)
> 
> Set from the first movie to the end of the second.

Jim and Bones don’t fool around at the Academy, not even once.

Sure, Jim hits on him the way he hits on anyone with a body that stays still long enough for him to do it (maybe that’s not a hard requirement either—it might have been the Andorian ale talking, but he’s pretty sure he saw the kid trying to chat up a noncorporeal being at a bar once). In fact, he loves it, trying line after line, treading around Bones’s irritation going nuclear. 

Nothing comes of it.

Not one fumble. No almost-kisses.

So no, they don’t fuck, but they do sleep together.

It’s not every night. Happens often enough, though, that while Bones can still sprawl across the bed and be perfectly comfortable by himself, he’s sometimes dimly surprised at just how much space there is when Jim isn’t there, that he can fling a limb without hitting another worn-out body.

It’s an accident, the first few times. They drink themselves into oblivion, study themselves into stupor, trade shards of their secrets until fatigue overtakes unearthed pains.

The first few times, Bones side-eyes Jim as he relinquishes his monopoly on the blankets and drags himself out of bed, while Jim forces a joke or two between gulps of coffee. By the time they feel awake enough to be human again, they barely exchange ten words.

Like everything with Jim in his life, though, he just kind of ups and learns to accept it. Takes Jim a little while to get used to it even though Bones would say he started it, anyway—if either of them consciously had this bad idea, it was Jim. Something stupid about his damaged loner persona, how Jim Kirk’s not meant to end up in anyone’s bed for two nights and whoa, not in a row or did Bones completely miss that?

Once they climb that hill, though, it’s comfortable, easy as handing over a flask. Surprising, yet comfortable.

Bones, always reluctant to rise early but ever-accustomed to it from summer mornings in Georgia to med school, is ready at every hour whether he wants to be or not. He’ll startle into consciousness at the smallest stimulus, and it’s not always convenient.

Somehow, Jim learns to circumvent jerking him awake. Miraculously, no longer does a shuffle of legs or puff of breath make his eyes snap open and his mind race down to ‘fleet Medical before his feet can take him there.

When he resurfaces from sleep of his own volition, he’s able to catch how Jim sleeps; neither of them are wholly comfortable with the lights all the way down.What he sees is that Jim ain't pretty in sleep. His cheek is smashed into the pillow, mouth gaping softly open. Arms extended, hands loose at the wrists. Fingers twitching faintly every now and again. What he sees is _reaching,_ Bones thinks, then never forgets.

He knows too much about good food, hell, made it through all of college actually getting his proper servings of vegetables, to submit to the replicated shit the Academy calls sustenance without a fight. Bones cooks. Little things, a plate of steamed asparagus left on the bedside table for Jim to find while he’s already snoring after a tough afternoon at surgery, maybe a strip or two of bacon set down unceremoniously in front of Jim’s sugary cereal. One Sunday Jim catches him staring wistfully at a holo of Joanna, arranging a chocolate chip face on a pancake, and before Bones can so much as glare in warning, simply nods thoughtfully and gives it grumpy banana-slice eyebrows.

It’s barely more complicated when it sneaks out of their quarters. If Jim ends up laughing into Bones’s neck at a party or Bones slings an arm around Jim’s shoulders and leaves it there, they don’t talk about it and they dare anyone else to breathe a word.

And then Jim gets his best girl, the _beautiful silver lady_ gets him, and Bones is of course thoroughly had by them both. Aboard the Enterprise, things don’t stay different for long.

The official separation of their spaces is not completely useless. They do in fact stick to their own quarters for a while, climb into empty beds that stay empty. It’s alright, really, since they barely have the chance to hang out during the day anyway with the flurry of new duties, so how could they expect to bum around together at night? 

Routine sets in, though, and old habits return. They end up having official meetings that get carried back to his quarters or Jim will come harass him until the end of his shift and follow him, a puppy he has to call captain, and of course he doesn’t turn him away. 

Shift scheduling wreaks as much havoc on their rhythms as the Academy did. They go sleepless. They wake and nap in fretful thirty minute intervals. Night after night they are wrenched away from their respective stations and nudged to their quarters to wake alone. Mornings are too often sour mouths, tangled sheets, blaring alarms.

Every now and again, though, it happens. They wake up together. And there are uncomplicated lazy grins, mutual griping about whatever toxic waste might be mistakenly approved for human consumption in the mess today. A slap on the back before they head down to their usual table–meant for two but by the end of breakfast, there are on occasion as many as four extra chairs clustered round.

Bones has nearly stumbled out into his ungodly A.M shifts in command yellow before. He never does make it past the initial corridor before he realizes. Infinitely worse, though, he has definitely stumbled out into his ungodly A.M shifts in a lingering good mood.

So his nurses figure out that he’s sleeping with Jim. And of course they think he’s sleeping with Jim.

Mostly, he just lets the rumors fly. Because yeah, while the idea that they’re fucking is a bunch of bullshit and he figures if they haven’t even groped each other by now, it’s never going to happen. Yet now people have finally accidentally come close to sussing the truth of it out: Jim is important to him, more than he can say. And if this is the push that makes people realize enough to ask about him, them, how they’re doing, well. Bones metes out well-worn complaints to cover for his careless fondness when he answers. To cover for how happy he is to speak about him.

When directly confronted, Bones usually says something wry along the lines of _he wishes._ Or just quirks an eyebrow until the nosy get uncomfortable.

People begin to ask Jim and he delights in it, too, though the exact wrong way (read: the Jim Kirk way). He develops this entire repertoire of annoying answers, which he takes care to deliver especially loudly whenever Bones is around.

_The personality? Yeah, could use some work. But the sex is great._

_Yeah, we’re totally in love, you can’t tell?_

_Those legendary hands? Lot more than legend, lemme tell you._

_Bones is going to propose soon, I can feel it. But don’t tell anyone!_

So this goes on for a while. Actually, it never goes away. They handle it just fine. Honestly, it doesn’t even top the list of what drives Bones to drink. The crew can dish out much worse, from breaking out in boils of unimaginable colors in unimaginable places to flooding engineering because of a putative prank war. And really, the ship’s rumor mill has enough cycling around that they never flare up into being the hottest topic.

It’s comfortable and easy to carry on like always and yeah, they eat lunch and dinner together, too. Justifiable, really. Jim’s more likely to sit himself down and stave off accidental starvation if he has the promise of Bones’s not-so-grudging company. Jim hangs around the sickbay when Bones is on shift and he’s on break and asks questions to which he already knows the answers or to which there aren’t yet answers and the entire medical staff is going to seriously hurt their eyeballs rolling them but they don’t send him away. Bones is on the bridge so often that people forget he’s not actually part of the bridge crew.

They pool pillows in a corner of the rec room to watch programs and listen to music and yup, doze off there, too. They share secret smirks across crowded rooms, laugh at stupid stray remarks that leave everyone else a step behind (is that a Tyrellian knife or are you just happy to see me?). Without consulting each other, with their independent means of pulling strings, they’ve had their personnel files edited in case of emergency. Because who else would they trust to be their primary contacts but each other?

But. But they haven’t fooled around, not even once. Don’t kiss. Aren’t dating. 

It’s friendship, that’s all.

All this, the deepest happiness either of them have ever been allowed, and they have to say they are _just_ friends, like that does it any kind of justice.

 

Bones is a doctor. He’s seen death. He’s seen death steal in soft through near-deserted rooms, he’s seen death rip through bodies held by a dozen helpless hands. He’s seen death often enough that as much as he hates to think it, he’s used to it. Doesn’t surprise him.

Disbelief doesn’t numb him when he sees his face. He knows death. It’s awareness that slams into him, curling his body in on itself. Awareness that bows his head.

Acceptance, though, acceptance is another matter, because he hardly has a minute to think of closed eyes, stopped heart, stilled blood—

He lifts his head and that’s that.

Doesn’t ever quite do the five stages. Because Jim’s not gone, not unless Bones fails to bring him back. It becomes another life, wild-eyed with stims, white-knuckled. At the edge all the time, tugging and tugging restless sleepless listless. He crumples onto the closest cot only when forced and every time he wakes to the monotony of stable but dormant vitals it’s relief and agony anew.

Acceptance never comes and he punishes himself every time he thinks of Jim’s absence as something immutable, a world without him as fact, because no, no, the son of a bitch can’t just leave him like that, can’t shut that cheeky mouth and bottle up that spry energy and keep him from swinging around in that captain’s chair grinning at Bones like he’s still some fool teenager.

That’s not how it works, that’s not how this ends, that’s not how this _ends._

He’s not sure who he should be thanking for his manic efficiency actually leading to progress. He sees the evidence of that progress every day in the routine of check-ups and readings. Sees it in his climbing health and returning functions and in the color in his cheeks. He’s not gone, because Bones is bringing him back.

And he does. Two weeks they spend in different worlds and he does bring him back. Jim wakes up.

Of course Bones’s mouth is full of words for him, sharp and soft and every shade between, brimming over, ready to spill past his lips.

Jim asks for Spock.

He manages just something weakly wry in return and that is not what he meant at all, but after, his words dry up.

Stay dried up. Oh, he communicates when it’s called for. He answers orders, addresses ship’s business, greets him tonelessly. Nothing beyond that. He’s neatly swallowed every last damn word held behind his lips for two weeks.

Jim doesn’t seem to be able to find his own words, or he loses them the minute he meets Bones’s eyes. Maybe it’s that they’re ringed purple with fatigue yet shine with tentative hope that scares him silent. Or maybe, Bones thinks, it’s that when he returns his gaze, it’s as if it’s still through the veil.

And well, he pulled him through to the other side, didn’t he? Can’t expect to be able to pull every last cloud from his sky eyes, too.

He wonders if he’s all there inside his head. If he dreams of crushing black the way Bones dreams of his face wan and white in the harsh lights of sickbay.

He doesn’t find out because he doesn’t even get to be his personal physician. No, those duties and that knowledge are carefully handed off to other people, doctors and nurses who can meet his eyes, who are objective in their psych evals. However, Bones still quietly, stubbornly ensures that he is consulted off to the side, behind the scenes, so to speak. Some things can’t change–and Jim’s personnel file tells them to come to him last, anyway.

Now Bones starts working the graveyard shifts, the long afternoons, the emergencies; hell, he works every shift he can ask for and those he can’t, he wrangles from someone reluctant but mostly unable to stop him.

Jim does much the same. He throws himself into the work with sunny smiles and if his efficiency levels waver in spite of the doubled hours he puts in, or the smile drops off his face every time someone in med blue who isn’t Bones comes to deliver a message to the bridge, everyone has the good sense to keep quiet about it.

In fact everything’s quiet, silent. 

There’s always the quotidian clamor of a starship, Bones just doesn’t share in it so much anymore. He hears Jim in his own head more often than in his voice. It’s damn lonely in the sickbay without him bouncing around.

When Bones just nods at Jim’s latest harebrained notion instead of picking a fight about it, Jim nearly scraps the whole idea on principle.

Their cramped tables for two that end up being for many more are replaced instead by large tables with single missing spaces.

They didn’t spend every night together before and Bones is used to having his bed to himself more often than not, really.

But it’s different when he knows that Jim won’t abuse the captain’s override code at all hours and bed won’t sink under his weight. 

And Jim’s never been clingy or anything but it’s strange to wake up morning after morning when no one’s stolen his blankets in retaliation. He’s not used to being able to order the lights to seventy without muffled swearing about being blinded and why didn’t he check whether he was there because Jim is a human being with feelings and a circadian rhythm that’s being fucked up the ass right now. It’s damn lonely in his quarters, too.

This past month and a half after Khan and the warp core has been the single longest period of time in his life. He’s tired. Keeps busy.

Tuesday has Bones doing open heart surgery on some poor ensign. He’s got the best technology in the known galaxies at his fingertips and he still has to do medieval shit like this. The procedure is an important one and yeah, keeps him way fucking busier than he bargained for. It’s looking like he’s going to recover fully, but it’s still with a sense of exasperation that he flops down in bed at last. He’s still dressed in everything but his boots, knowing he’ll have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at some ungodly hour that’ll come far too soon.

He’s tired. He’s so tired and is it so wrong to just want to sleep and not wake up alone? It’s damn lonely but there are walls he doesn’t know how to breach. 

Eventually, he drifts off into an uneasy sleep– then snaps awake immediately. Being a surgeon on call has trained him well to be a light sleeper.

An inhale against his nape. Fingers curled into the blues at his waist.

 _Okay, who do I need to talk to about changing this antiseptic? It should at least smell better than the crap it’s supposed to cover._

Bones shoves his face into the pillow and dazedly wonders from where the lump in his throat came.

_’ve just been buried up to the elbows in a man for five hours, kid. Want to shut up?_

If that startled laugh into his skin is chased by a little hysteria, he’s not in a position to say anything because that, that small, golden sound feels like coming home.

 _Shutting up,_ he says obediently. _Sorry, Bones._

He stills for a moment, aching eyes wide in the dark of the room.

They slide closed. He brushes steady fingertips over Jim’s knuckles.

_S’okay._

The next morning finds their knees hooked into each other’s space and fingers clinging. The spare inches between their mouths are warm with breath breathed free at long, long last. Blinking open slowly, sky eyes meet ground.

And if they’re back to being disgustingly glued together, if the PADD Bones hands off to his nurse two days later turns out to be Jim’s, if they squash beside each other in the captain’s chair when a party on the bridge makes it tight for space, no one says anything.

They never do talk about it, either. Not after breakneck surface missions that end in Jim under Bones’s unshaking hands and worry-tight face, not after everything from pricey bourbon to cheap Altair liquor loosens their tongues. Not during chinks of afternoons in Bones’s office or stolen moments in the turbolift or long hours before or after shift, lying in bed, just breathing, breathing.

In fact, everything is comfortably, easily quiet.

Everything goes unspoken.

But it isn’t silent again.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic at a time in my life that I had a weird relationship with romance, but I'm still proud of the fic. You're free to interpret it as purely friendship or pre-slash as you wish.


End file.
